Annotation XXVIII

”Love your enemies.” — Matthew 5:44

On the unforgivable sin.

Augustine, in the first book On the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, chapter 43, discoursed certain things about the sin unto death, which he corrected in the nineteenth chapter of the first book of the Retractations, with these words: “In another place I judge a brother’s sin to be ‘unto death’ when — after the acknowledgment of God through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ — someone attacks the brotherhood and, against that very grace by which he was reconciled to God, is driven by the firebrands of envy. This I did not firmly affirm, since I said that I ‘thought’ this; but yet it had to be added: if he ends this life in such wicked perversity of mind. For concerning any [however] evil person while set in this life, one must certainly not despair; nor is prayer imprudently [made] for him of whom one does not despair.”

Again, in chapter 44 of the same book, he seems to assert that the sin of those attacking the brotherhood is so exceedingly pernicious that no one can rise again from it. For he says: “The stain of that sin is so great that it cannot submit to the humility of praying [for pardon], even if, by an evil conscience, one is forced both to acknowledge and to declare his sin.”

The divine Thomas, in the third part of the Summa, question 86, mitigating this saying, says it is to be understood in the way in which we are wont to say that he “cannot be healed” who cannot easily be healed. For although this sin is by its own nature most difficult to cure, it can nevertheless easily be cured by the help of divine grace — which, according to David’s saying, sometimes even turns [dries up] the depth of the sea.